


The Newest Weasley Whatsit

by Wordstreamer



Series: February Ficlets 2019 [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Rated T for language, Teddy's mentioned, War Trauma, also for a few things that happened in canon, so are a handful of other characters, very slightly alluded to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 11:47:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17642204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wordstreamer/pseuds/Wordstreamer
Summary: Anything that Muggles can do, magic should be able to do better.Or, Lily has no idea why her parents would look at a blank journal like that.





	The Newest Weasley Whatsit

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt #2: Blank Book

Ginny’s proud of their family.  She is.  Even if she doesn’t always agree with them, she loves them and she delights in their accomplishments.

And she’s heard Hermione, and Harry, and every other person that’s spent time in the Muggle world talking about fantastic innovations that they don’t have in the Wizarding world.  Yes, a lot of things are better here, but Muggle technology is catching up in giant leaps.

The internet!  Her father’s still trying to understand it; _she_ doesn’t even understand it all that well.  It helps, a little, that most Muggles don’t completely understand it either.  They use it, but they don’t know all the details about how it works—rather like wizards using spells without understanding the theory behind them, is how Hermione put it.

Anything that Muggles can do, magic should be able to do better.  Or at the very least, to improve upon.  Sure, the Black family had a set of mirrors that could communicate across distances, but they were heirlooms, and easily broken ones.  Muggles have had phones for a very long time, and even cell phones aren’t the novelty that they once were.  Some of them are nearly indestructible.  The more fragile ones can still be dropped without shattering to pieces, which is much better than a lot of the Wizarding World’s offerings.

There’s a heavy push towards Muggle technology being customized so that it can work whether or not it’s in close proximity to magic, but there’s also—of course—a lot of pushback from people who want nothing to do with it.

It’s not just the purebloods.  (Ginny’s self-aware of that enough to know that her insistence on that is, partially, because she’s a pureblood.)  Some of the snobbier families, yes, but it’s mostly the older witches and wizards who don’t want to completely revolutionize their ways of life.   When you’ve been alive for a century, she supposes, you get used to a certain way of doing things.

All of this is to say that Weasleys’ Wheezes and Whatsits still sells jokes, but they’ve got a side business that makes a tidy profit on selling Wizarding equivalents to Muggle inventions.  No one quite likes the name, but they’re trying to find one that’ll work with Teddy or Lupin.  Everything they’ve come up with so far doesn’t sound right or sounds like something else.  _(Teddy’s Tools._   No.)

You miss your iPod?  Here; this tiny little thing can not only access any radio network in the world, it can also access any music in their libraries.  (Teddy swears that he hasn’t figured out a way to connect to the internet yet; Harry thinks it’s because he doesn’t want to explain it to anyone else.  Reading between the lines of Teddy’s rambling, George’s winking, and the letters from Teddy’s favorite test subjects, Ginny thinks it’s because he doesn’t have all of the bugs worked out.)

You want to watch a movie?  Several movies?  Pensieves that will play out visual and auditory memories for everyone to see; they come pre-loaded with the most requested movies and plays.  (Percy mutters about copyright infringement, but since he doesn’t look too anxious, Ginny assumes they’re working on it.)

Teddy Lupin is one of the best magical inventors that Ginny’s ever met, and that’s including her brothers.  (She’s not saying he’s _better,_ but he’s definitely around their level.)  And George has been making a steady living for long enough that their mother didn’t complain too much when it became clear that Lily was going to follow in his footsteps.  (It probably helps that Lily isn’t Molly’s only granddaughter.)  She works with Teddy more than George, but she’s still in a family business, and clever as you could want.

Ginny’s lost track of the times that Lily comes back to their house—still _home_ to their children in so many ways, even if they’ve moved out—with some new idea or prototype.  And she’s so glad, _so_ glad, that Lily still takes pride in sharing these with them.

When Lily puts a blank journal on the table, eyes dancing with delight, she doesn’t know why Harry’s face temporarily loses all expression and Ginny looks at it like it’s going to reach out and poison her.

“If you write in it, it sends the message to whoever has its mate!” she says.  For the first time in years, Ginny doesn’t have immediate wonder or praise for Lily’s presentation.

“Do the messages stay?” Harry asks.  “After you’ve sent them?”

“Well, yeah.”  Lily glances between the two of them, brow furrowing as she realizes that something’s wrong.

“Good,” Ginny says.  “That’s good.”

“I know that owl post is fast, but this would be even faster.  Immediate.  You write out the message, tap your wand to it and say _Mitto_.  It sends what’s on the page to your partner.  You can send drawings, blueprints, all kinds of things.  Anything you can put down on the page.”

“That could be very useful on time-sensitive missions,” Harry says.

“Or deadlines,” Ginny adds.

“Exactly,” Lily says, choosing to let the tension go for now.  Ginny’s sure there will be at least one question later, but that gives them time to come up with the words they’ll need.  In the meantime, she’s more than happy to accept the journals that Lily brought them—two for Ginny and two for Harry; one for each of them that’s synced to one in Lily’s possession, and one that’s just for the two of them to share.  Lily talks about the process of linking multiple journals without losing any of the strength of the spells during dinner.

When she’s left for the night, Ginny writes the first lines in the notebook they share: _Thank you._

 _You’re welcome!  See you Sunday_.

\--

There were a lot of topics that triggered explosions, early on in Harry and Ginny’s relationship.  The Horcrux hunt, her sixth year at Hogwarts, the scars that Tom left on both of them, expectations that they—and the rest of the world—had of each other.  Even after they settled most of those, even after their relationship was solid enough to get married, even after they’d decided to have children, they still had a massive question to answer.

What to tell their children about the war.

You could say just let them learn about it in history books, but that wasn’t going to work when people still came up to Harry in the street five years after the war to tearfully praise him, or when a nasty blood purist who never _quite_ became a Death Eater sent Harry into St. Mungo’s for a solid week.  It’s all well and good to tell them that their father’s a hero who defeated a villain…  But it’s another thing for them to hear in Diagon Alley about how their father died and came back at seventeen.

Jamie was tricky, since he was the first, and the one who came up with the most unexpected questions.  Then Al, who looked so much like Harry, which mattered to too many people.  By the time that Lily came along, they’d gotten most of the rhythm down.  And with all three of them—as with everyone—they didn’t go into too many details about the Horcruxes.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione knew.  And Ginny, after a particularly vicious fight with Harry about being his girlfriend and not his daughter, about how he was on the run and she saw first years tortured in her own fucking school, learned everything.  She’ll never quite know what it was like to be on the Horcrux hunt, no, but she knows more about it than anyone else who wasn’t there.

They didn’t tell their children that Ron left Harry and Hermione in the middle.  Maybe, if it had ever seemed like it’d offer a reassuring moral, that not all divides are permanent, they would have said something about that.  They didn’t talk about Nagini using Bathilda Bagshot’s corpse like a puppet.

They didn’t tell them that Tom Riddle possessed Ginny.  They did tell them not to trust anything if they can’t see where it keeps its mind, but even that lesson’s a little harder to hold onto in these days of emails and text messages and the Wizarding World’s approximations thereof.  How can you know if that’s a message coming from a real, living, thinking, person?  But how can you know for _sure?_   (This is something that Ginny’s just had to accept: you can’t.)

Their children didn’t need to know that Ginny had been so lonely that no one noticed her writing to a ghost and disappearing into its diary, or how she and Harry both have nightmares about the Chamber of Secrets to this day.

Lily does deserve to know why her parents were, briefly, horrified at the thought of a journal that will answer you if you write to it.

It’s a short conversation.  Horcruxes don’t come into play, just that a younger Voldemort, in the form of a sentient diary, wrote to and then possessed both Ginny and Harry.  Maybe it’s just a sign of how strange their lives are, maybe it’s just that the longer explanation is sure to be even worse, but Lily doesn’t ask any other questions. 

She does, however, make sure that the writing can’t be erased by either party.  Ginny’s lips twitch into a slight smile when she hears that.

**Author's Note:**

> I do not love this, but I also don't hate it, and every note I try to add sounds too self-deprecating. I have given up on a good note and decided to look at this as the rough draft of an ode to parentheses.


End file.
